Cloaking

[ihelpyou]

Good read and opinions about cloaking from Danny Sullivan subscibers:

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/01/sd0718-cloaking.html

I personally do not see the need to ever cloak, but that is my opinion. Cloaking is far too used for spamming.

The notion that you feel the need to hide your source code from prying eyes is bogus.

Go ahead, check out MY source code on the home page of my main site! Copy ALL the tags and even some of the content if you wish! This will not do anyone ANY good whatsoever to improve search engine ranks. Trust me.

[JuniorHarris]

Let's not miss the real issue here, which is the spam itself!~

I'm sure there are legitimate reasons for cloaking, but this technique has been abused by the spammers and can be difficult to detect by the search engines. Of course there are also those that spam using <frames>, <noframes>, redirects and layers. Probably more of these, as good IP delivery can be very complex.

To discredit a technique simply because the spammers have abused it, would include almost every aspect of web development today!~ The spammers (like roaches) have infested almost every technique/method of delivery on the internet today.

The engines have been able to deploy filters for most standard techniques, but cloaking can still be quite difficult to detect. However, I imagine this would be easily resolved by utilizing a remote proxy to crawl the site using both an anonymous IP address and a stock user agent name. A resulting term vector signature could be assigned and compared with what the engine has cached. (Granted this would have to occur at time of indexing).

All this may be moot as engines start to focus more on establishing hub and authority status, and using popularity to determine relevancy and rankings. If implemented today, almost every stand-alone spam page/site would instantly be filtered out, as well as many others since good reciprocal links are always genuine.

It's not necessarily the technique with which I have issue as much as it is the intent!~ :nerd:

[ihelpyou]

Yes, the intent is what gives the legitimate ways a bad time.

You made a good point with IP cloaking is Very difficult. One mistake can get you into trouble. Just not worth the effort for many sites.

[Mel]

Hi all:

Read an article recently where a very big SEO firm had a lawsuit filed against it for pagejacking over 1500 well known pages and used these pages with cloaking to get high ranks for the original pages competitors.

The interesting thing here is that they used the AV translation service to read the cloaked pages since the cloaking software saw babelfish as an AV spider and obiediently served up the hijacked pages for translation.

This is the type of thing that is giving cloaking a bad name.

[ihelpyou]

Love to read that article Mel. Is there a link to it?

That is probably the worst kind of SPAM. SEO's using the content of others only to acheive better ranks. They should be banned from ALL the engines with NO prayer of being re-instated.

[I.Q. bandit]

SEO firm had a lawsuit filed against it for pagejacking over 1500 well known pages

Pagejacking, What the h*ll. What ever happened to the old fashion bank robberies? Soon in the near future it seems that all major crimes will be commited on-line. :rolleyes:

[Mel]

Hi doug and All

Here are some links to this situation.

From Search Engine Watch:

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sereport/00/05-pagejacking.html

From Web guerilla:

http://pagejacking.webguerrilla.com/

Sorry can't give you the links to the Greenflash website which were running last week, but now require a password to log-in.

I note that Green Flash has suddenly gone out of the SEO business when faced with this lawsuit.

This case will likely add to the search engines determination to stamp out cloaking, although there are many legitimate uses for it.
Note that Web Guerilla uses cloaking themselves in order to allow the spiders to index dynamically generated pages.

[JuniorHarris]

Remember this was also done very recently by a very high profile SEO!~ And he didn't use cloaking at all, but instead generated the same effect using frames!~ Sure ban cloaking (thought it already was), but there will always be another way to spam.

We need to target the spammers, and what I'd like to see is their domains confiscated....and the individual banned from ever registering domains again. Similar to convicted felons and handguns...stop it at the source! We can always build better locks...but until the criminal is removed they will always find a way through these locks.

[ihelpyou]

yea JH, have you noticed all the URL's of that SEO you are referring to are still in Google??

Maybe if you are high profile you are given priviledges with this. If that was me spamming like that, I would have been long banned by now.

[JuniorHarris]

Yes that does bother me...I suppose it's not who you spam but who you know!?!

It also leaves me wondering how many other experts may be using similar practices, or have indeed been using these practices all along to obtain high rankings for themselves and their clients. :eek:

[ihelpyou]

The only thing I can figure is that Google did not make the changes in time for the last refresh. Maybe the Url's will be gone in this update?

If not, enough people must have came to his defense. Maybe Greg from http://www.webguerrilla.com/ can shed some light on this as he knows what we are referring to.

Greg?

[JuniorHarris]

I just don't understand how Google can be said to have such a strong opposition to cloaking, yet they continue to rank [very highly] a site which not only utilized a poor man's cloak (frames) but also kode-jacked in the process!~ I would expect any one of the two would be sufficient grounds for banning...

[Mel]

Hi all:

Has anyone reported the SEO in question to google?

[ihelpyou]

Yea, from what I understand, a bunch of people.